Description
The Stephen King Amusement Park
– an unnerving experience, with
rides every which way to hell …
and a few to glory.
A solitary finger pokes out of a
drain. Novelty teeth turn predatory.
Flies s.ettle and die on an old pair of
sneakers in New York, and the
Nevada desert swallows a Cadillac.
Meanwhile, the legend of Castle
Rock returns … and grows on you.
What does it all mean? What else
could it mean? First there was
Night Shift (1978), then Skeleton Crew
(1985), and now Stephen King is’
back with a third collection of stories
– a vast, many-chambered cave of a
volume.
The long reach of Stephen King’s
imagination and the no-holds-barred
force of his storytelling have never
been so richly demonstrated.
There’s something here for readers
of every stripe and predilection _
classic tales of the macabre and the
monstrous, cutting-edge
explorations of the borderlands
between good and evil, brilliant
pastiches of Chandler and Conan
Doyle, even a teleplay and a non-
fiction bonus, King’s heartfelt piece
on Little League baseball that first
appeared in The New Yorker. In story
after story, King takes readers to
places they’ve never been before.
They will lose a good deal of sleep.
But Stephen King, writing to beat the
devil, will do their dreaming for
them.
Stephen King’s books are worldwide
bestsellers. His two most recent
novels, Gerald’s Game and Dolores
Claiborne have received some of his
best reviews. The Dark Half, The
Tommyknockers, The Stand and
Needful Things have all recently
been adapted for film or television
productions for forthcoming release.
Hardcover
593 pages
In good to very good preloved condition
Many people who write about horror literature maintain that mood is its most important element. Stephen King disagrees: “My deeply held conviction is that story must be paramount…. All other considerations are secondary–theme, mood, even characterization and language.”
These fine stories, each written in what King calls “a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism,” prove his point. The theme, mood, characters, and language vary, but throughout, a sense of story reigns supreme. Nightmares & Dreamscapes contains 20 short tales–including several never before published–plus one teleplay, one poem, and one nonfiction piece about kids and baseball that appeared in the New Yorker. The subjects include vampires, zombies, an evil toy, man-eating frogs, the burial of a Cadillac, a disembodied finger, and a wicked stepfather. The style ranges from King’s well-honed horror to a Ray Bradbury-like fantasy voice to an ambitious pastiche of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. And like a compact disc with a bonus track, the book ends with a charming little tale not listed in the table of contents–a parable called “The Beggar and the Diamond.” –Fiona Webster